Her Father's Daughter (8 page)

Her father's holding her hand, but he isn't talking. He seems sad, the child thinks, leaning to the side from time to time so she can see his face, check on his mood. She's always worried, the child is, about her father's frame of mind. He, though, doesn't look at her, he doesn't see her. He's walking a little too quickly for her, his eyes unseeing, his head full of goodness knows what. He seems to be somewhere else. But there is still his hand, firmly holding the child's hand, his warm, familiar hand, rough and soft all at the same time, the friendly giraffe-hand.

The father and child walk unsmiling through the indifferent crowd, through that Sunday's shouts, noises and music. The father walking blindly with the child, who feels like a part of him.

And there in a square stands a merry-go-round with wooden horses circling to stilted music, a barrel organ spilling out an old-time tune. The child thinks it's lovely, the horses turning, the strange music. She drags her father gently by the hand to show him, to tear him away from his thoughts.

He thinks she's asking for a ride on the merry-go-round.

‘Do you want to have a ride? Is that it?'

The child nods, solemn. It's easier.

The merry-go-round happens to stop then anyway. The father hoists the child astride a horse, secures her properly, carefully, with the strap.

‘You're sure you won't fall? Will you hold on?'

The child smiles, happy at his concern, his attention. She's a child who has a father; that's what she thinks in a muddled way, fleetingly, with pride.

The merry-go-round sets off and the plaintive organ music starts up again. The child clutches the vertical pole that runs through her horse, fixing it to the platform and the brightly painted dome.

And every time she passes her father, as the ride turns, she looks at him. There he is, standing among the other parents. But he doesn't seem to see anything, miles away, lost in thought. He's not watching the child.

Then all of a sudden she feels very strongly that he's going to leave, that he's in the process of leaving now and she won't be able to see him again. She wants to get off this horse, to stop everything, to stop this thing
which is now happening, which will carry on happening, going on and on, like the merry-go-round.

When the ride finally comes to an end, it's the old man who runs it who unhitches her. She throws herself into her father's arms. He's amazed by this show of emotion. He doesn't understand. He's already gone.

On a few more occasions, when the father gets home – he comes back from the office later and later now – he goes to sit next to the child on the sofa in the dining room, or on the edge of her bed if she's already gone down. He asks her what she's done today, whether she's been good, if everything's all right. That sort of thing. The father isn't very imaginative these days. The child always gives the right answer: everything's always all right, isn't it? He seems satisfied, even though she thinks she can see something like sadness in his eyes. Perhaps it's just boredom: nowadays the father often seems slightly removed from what he's saying, or what he's looking at.

The child asks him, as she used to before, to tell her a story. The one about the forest and the dwarves. He starts. Then he realizes she's not following it, not listening. And he's right, it's not the story she's hearing. It's his voice she's listening to, as she thinks about very difficult things.

Then the father gets annoyed and walks away.

The evening when the father didn't come home for the first time, the child waited an age. She waited for him like a woman in love. Helplessly. She waited after supper. And even long after she'd been put to bed. He didn't come.

He didn't come home the next day either, and she waited again.

She will always remember this new kind of waiting. The furious need to hear his voice, to be reunited with the smell of his pipe, with the freckles on his hands. His giraffe-hands. To touch them. To play with them. And to talk to him. To say what? She doesn't know. But she would know, she thinks, if he were there. She'd know.

She waits, huddled in a corner by the door. She listens out for the familiar sound of the lift, footsteps on the landing. It's never him. He's still not back. She waits.

The child's mother walks past, sees her, and tells her not to hang around there like that, he won't come back. In fact he'll never come back. My darling. He's left them.

The child doesn't say anything. She doesn't understand these words. She doesn't believe what she's being told. Anything her mother tells her. She escapes the clutches of this woman who wants to touch her, to talk to her, her mother with her tears and her ugly face, she ducks away from her brutally, she doesn't want to see her, or hear her. She runs away to the grey room where her bed is, and there, next to her bed, she sits on the floor and shunts her toys around on the carpet, singing to herself.

The grandmother, who just so happens to be there, strays from room to room, muttering goodness knows what.

Over her words, the neighbours' radio keeps up its noise. It's suppertime, as if everything's normal.

Peculiar days now for the child. With her father's absence, everything seems to have become absence. Hazy images, muted sounds, indistinct words, lost in indifference.

It's a world of absence. The child has become absence too.

She is living, though. And one thing proves she's even reverted to being as difficult and capricious as she was before her father came home: she's gone back to smothering the walls with drawings and signs in coloured crayon, with complete impunity. It doesn't seem to bother anyone any more.

‘Your father lives in a different house now,' the mother says one day.

Just like that. Incidentally. She's holding a letter in her hand.

And this, for once, the child takes in. Is it the word
house
that strikes her, that creates an image? In any event, it's enough. She takes it in. She learns this fact, this news, that her father has left. This time her mother's telling the truth.

The mother hasn't cried for a while now. Her face is blank, severe, altered. She dresses badly. In clothes she used to wear for doing housework. She doesn't wear make-up. She looks like an old woman. She looks more and more like the grandmother.

They're facing each other, the child and her mother, both serious, and the child feels like a grown-up looking across at another grown-up.

The mother doesn't try to kiss her, to draw her close. No. She looks at her seriously. And the child understands this look.

The child doesn't ask any questions. Her mother goes on to tell her that her father wants her to know he'll come to see her. Soon.

When's soon? thinks the child. But she doesn't ask anything, doesn't say anything. She's just anxious at the thought of this visit she'd stopped hoping for – well, almost stopped – this visit with its terribly sketchy outline, this visit she can't picture.

When? What will
he
say? What will
he
do? And then what when the visit's over? Will he really leave? How will he go about it? And what about her, the child, what will she say? What should she do?

Days go by.

The evening her father appears, the child has no warning. The mother probably has none either. The bell rings. The mother calls to the child to open the door, which is a struggle for her, given her height. And she suddenly finds herself confronted with her father's stature. She'd already forgotten how tall he is. She can't speak. It's too soon for the child. Too difficult. Wrong-footed, she doesn't say a thing, tilts her head to receive the kiss her father leans forward to give her.

He sits in the grey room. Looks around like a traveller returning to a forgotten country. The child follows him. But then Li suddenly appears in the kitchen doorway, theatrical, eyes shining, monopolizing the scene. And words fly, the argument begins, voices are raised here and there. Not for long. The mother's wonderful assurance
is snapping already and she's crying, as she stands there by the door, like a broken thing.

Meanwhile the child has come and sat silently on the sofa, beside her father, who's still talking loudly, not looking at her.

Li abandons the fight, slamming the door behind her.

The father turns to the child. He doesn't say anything. He looks at her. How he looks at her. And, what with the tenderness in his eyes, the child looks away.

He also looks at the drawings splattered over the walls. He looks at them slowly, in detail. The child is rather frightened.

‘It doesn't matter,' the father says simply.

And this time when he pulls her to him to sit her on his lap, she puts up no resistance.

They stay like that for a while, in silence. He holds her close to him, and she rediscovers the forgotten warmth and the smell of tobacco and eau de cologne which, for her, already belongs to before.

And then he peels himself away from her, gently, gets up and leaves.

The father's visits are now more or less regular. In fact he's been asked, please, from now on, to let them know in advance when he's coming. He arrives on Saturday or Sunday and always brings something for the child, a surprise. A toy. Some sweets. An orange. A scarf.

When he gets there the child first spies out the bag, wrapping paper or envelope with the new object inside it. It's not so much the type of present she's interested in, as what it means to her. More or less affection from her father. His interest in her. She needs to gauge it.

Once her father has left, the new present joins the others, with her treasures, her precious secret treasure trove where so many things are now hoarded together, a wooden Pinocchio, a mechanical chick, two bars of American chocolate, some acid drops, a woolly hat she never wears for fear of losing it, the fateful accounts book, the two sausage-dog-shaped Métro tickets and the box of paints. All hidden under her bed. Luckily, no one does much cleaning in the house. Particularly now.

During the father's visits, Li is always there threatening to intervene, to make a scene or cry. And sometimes even the grandmother, often on Sundays, pulling an extraordinary face and sidling into the room when she's least expected, with her thin old lady's light-footed step.

The father and the child don't talk much, and his visits never last long anyway.

‘Next time I'll take you to a restaurant,' the father says one day.

The restaurant day is a Sunday. The mother has dressed the child in her blue coat and her black patent-leather shoes, now rather tight, with white socks pulled up high. Her hair's been well brushed but no one tries curling it any more. It doesn't matter. It'll be fine as it is. The mother's tired. The grandmother, who's there, has her important-days face.

The child waits for her father.

She's ready. She thinks she looks gorgeous and wonders when he'll arrive. She's been going round in circles in the apartment for a long time now, pacing in her little shoes, which make an irritating noise on the wooden floor.

‘Calm down,' the grandmother scolds. ‘Stay still for a minute, for God's sake! You'll drive us mad!'

The mother's irritable too, shuts herself in the kitchen ‘to avoid seeing
him
'.

At the first ring of the doorbell, the child runs to open the door. The father doesn't come in: he kisses the child and, as no one's appeared, he calls out that he'll ‘bring
her
back at about five'.

There, they've left, the father and his child. Alone. Hand in hand. Her little hand reunited with her father's big hand.

Her black shoes patter swiftly down the stairs…

But there's already something panicking the child. She's thinking about the question her mother has told her to ask her father, the words she's been made to practise and which she'll have to pronounce: ‘Daddy, are you going to come back to us?' Tricky. The child's well aware of that. When to say it? Now or later? And how? It bothers the child terribly, this problem does, as they walk along the street in silence, she and her father. She decides to put it off till they're having lunch.

For now she's trying to think only of this moment, of this hand holding hers at last, of the tall familiar figure beside her, a figure which leans over from time to time and asks if everything's all right, if they're not walking too quickly, if she's happy. Can you hear me, France?

Yes, of course everything's all right; no, they're not walking too quickly, but even so. The child trots along to keep up with her father, gives one-word answers. Happy, yes, very. But the thought of the question she must ask comes back to her. The child falls silent.

They take the Métro. They take the Métro as they did before. As they did that time with the Métro-ticket dogs. But today the father doesn't seem to be thinking about ticket dogs, or anything like that. What's he daydreaming about exactly, with such a serious face? No knowing.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't see anything either, apparently, his eyes lost, gazing at a spot just above the child who's sitting facing him. She, the child, is looking at him with all her might. Actually, she rather likes it when he's distracted.

Where are they going? It feels like a long way, possibly further than she's ever been in Paris. But, anyway, that's not what she's interested in, not where they're going, the name of the place, whether it's near or far, not that sort of thing. She's with her father, she's going to have lunch with her father, she has her father all to herself for the whole day.